For safety’s sake

The woman, who looked to be in her late 70s or early 80s, stood patiently as a female Transportation Security Administration officer ran her blue-gloved hands over her body, first placing them up inside the woman’s inner thighs before moving to other body parts. The security officer reached up into the woman’s hair and also seemed to place her hands on or near the woman’s breasts.

“They’ve been working on her for five minutes,” remarked another woman, glancing up from her book in the waiting area where exiting passengers emerge next to the security checkpoint for boarding passengers at the Eugene Airport.

The older woman was undergoing a standard “pat-down” procedure at about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday under the TSA’s new screening regulations that have provoked complaints from airline passengers and civil liberties advocates across the nation. The new procedures prompted a TSA investigation after an incident earlier this month at San Diego International Airport in which a passenger told a security officer, “If you touch my junk, I’m going to have you arrested.” That passenger, 31-year-old John Tyner of Oceanside, Calif., whose 15-minute YouTube video of the incident he recorded with his cell phone has gone viral online, had been pulled aside into a private area for an “enhanced pat-down” in which TSA security officers do groin checks and other, more probing, techniques.

The pat-down procedures were initiated at the Eugene Airport on Oct. 29 and have not resulted in any complaints from passengers, airport spokeswoman Cathryn Stephens said. Enhanced pat-downs, if necessary, are done in a private area behind a curtain, she said. Eugene Airport does not have the new whole-body scan devices that TSA has installed at numerous major hubs.

“I’ve only heard from people who are not passengers,” said Stephens, referring to one phone call and three e-mails from Lane County residents about the new procedures. All commented that they don’t agree with the policy, Stephens said.

In the midst of the airline industry’s busiest time of the year, Thanksgiving weekend, the TSA — created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — has gone on the offensive in recent days to address passenger concerns about the stepped-up security methods. In a public service announcement Monday, TSA Administrator John Pistole thanked airline travelers for “being our partners in security” and said the new procedures are for everyone’s safety.

Pistole established the new procedures — which TSA has gradually implemented at airports across the nation this year — in the wake of an incident in Detroit last Christmas in which a Nigerian man who had traveled on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam tried to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear.

In a national conference call with reporters Monday, Pistole was peppered with questions about the procedures. Some passengers have been concerned that images from new body-scan devices known as Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) machines, which allow TSA security officers to see through a person’s clothes and clearly reveal features of their bodies, could end up online.

“As soon as the image is taken, it’s deleted,” Pistole said.

As for some airline passengers accusing security personnel of committing sexual assault or other rights violations, Pistole said those are wild tales. One passenger claimed to have been handcuffed, but a video review of the incident proved that “it just wasn’t true,” Pistole said.

More than 35 million passengers have boarded planes since the new procedures were implemented, but only about 2,000 complaints have been lodged, Pistole said. And most of those are of the I-just-didn’t-like-it variety, not groping accusations, he said.

The Eugene Airport will get an AIT machine in the future, Stephens said.

Helene Smith of San Pedro, Calif., who arrived at the Eugene Airport Tuesday morning from San Francisco by way of Los Angeles, said she was put through one of the body-scan machines at Los Angeles International Airport. Passengers who are selected for the scans can forego them and opt for an enhanced pat-down instead, TSA spokesman Dwayne Baird said.

“I’d rather not have the radiation,” said Smith, who flew to Eugene with her boyfriend, Greg Leonard, to see her sister, Dawn Cianciulli. “But radiation or being felt up? It’s kind of a tough call.”

Smith wondered why she was selected for scanning while Leonard, who has long, dark hair and was wearing sunglasses and carrying a guitar case, was much more “suspicious” looking. “I think they wanted to see me naked and not my boyfriend,” Smith said, laughing, of the male security officer who scanned another woman before scanning her.

Only about 3 percent of airline passengers receive the pat-downs or body scans, Baird said. And only those who keep triggering the metal detectors when they walk through security are selected, he added. However, Smith said she was selected randomly Tuesday at LAX.

After the older woman passenger at Eugene Airport was pulled aside for a standard pat-down, another woman in her 50s or 60s also received one. Gayle Brown, 79, of Cottage Grove, stared incredulously through the glass partition. “Geez, they really went over her,” said Brown, who was waiting for his daughter and her husband to arrive from Fresno via San Francisco. “You need security, but Jesus, it seems a tough way to go,” said Brown, who added that he has not flown in years. “When they started asking me to take my shoes off, I stopped flying,” he said.